Sorry for the month-long hiatus, but I'm back at it again. I ran across an interesting post on The Register that described a software solution from ScaleMP that will allow a customer to link two dual-socket x86 servers via InfiniBand and have them behave as if they were a single four-socket server.
Why not just buy a single four-socket server you ask? Well, according to ScaleMP there are two compelling reasons:
- Two dual-socket servers are less expensive "to purchase" than a four-socket server (TCO aside...).
- Hardware vendors have a tendency to introduce more advanced and faster processors in their dual-socket servers first.
According to their website, ScaleMP has created a new approach to virtualization with their Versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture coined "High-end virtualization", which is the aggregation of multiple physical systems to function as a single logical system or the opposite of logical partitions or LPARs.
vSMP Standalone Foundation is the little brother to their product that can support the aggregation of up to 32 sockets and 1TB of memory. The standalone software has a starting price tag of $2,750 and they claim with the price of two dual-socket servers, you could potentially have the performance of a four-socket server for less than $10,000.
I don't know how I would make the argument to management that introducing more servers in my data center is good thing, especially in light of the political and business pressure to reduce resource consumption in the data center. What do you think? Would you be interested in this solution or "High-end virtualization"?
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